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TECHNICAL REVIEW G R N E MG R O N G N G WI APE AKI WI Jay Flachsbarth Winemaker Brent Amos gets ready to dump a MacroBin of wine grape clusters into an elevator headed for the Vaucher Beguet destemmer-crusher. tanks, sufficient power and so on. The winery came full of equipment, most of which the Maiers replaced. Besides remodeling the tasting room and event spaces, they introduced some interesting functional touches in the production area, replacing all the wooden structures with tile or something else inert, to stave off microbial growth, and coating the floors with a thick layer of polyurethane, making them not only sanitary but crack-free, resilient and easily gripped even when wet. The facility is built into a gentle hillside, with tank and barrel rooms on the ground floor and the bottling line and outdoor crush pad higher up on a second level. The total production area is roughly 3,500 square feet. Las Positas is licensed for making up to 10,000 cases of wine; winemaker Brent Amos thinks the winery would max out at about 7,500; and for the moment, the goal is strengthening the quality of the 2,500-case output. The once-planned winery—the one that never got built—lives on in the Las Positas label. The central image is inspired by the original design, overlaid with an homage to the sensibility of a New Orleans painter the Maiers are fond of, James Michalopoulos. One of his paintings hangs just outside the tasting room, tying everything together. Fortunately, the image bears a passing resemblance to the new winery, or at least its color scheme. tanks or barrels for fermentation. The configuration of the crush pad for reds is slightly unusual: Grapes head up an elevator to the Vaucher Beguet destemmercrusher (mostly for destemming) and then onto a CMA sorting table. Obvious MOG gets pulled out in the field or on the elevator; the sorting table helps get rid of jacks and allows a small portion of free-run juice to be collected on the spot and routed into the pink wine program. (Las Positas makes its rosé from a bit of every red variety that comes in the door, making for slight variations from year to year.) The cleaned fruit is then pumped downstairs for tank fermentation. The new tanks purchased for the winery come from Prospero and feature computer control of temperature and pump-over cycles. Tank capacity ranges from 500 gallons to 2,000 gallons. The tanks are all 3/4 jacketed, so the smallest lots of grapes (less than 1 ton) are the only ones that go through bin fermentation. Winemaker Amos prefers tanks to bins for the greater temperature control. Las Positas also has several 600-gallon movable Transtores that can be used for small lots and cold stabilization when hooked up to a G&D chiller. Outside the winery, along the driveway, are four Santa Rosa Stainless Steel tanks from the original winery equipment, larger in capacity and fully jacketed, thus able to do their work outdoors. A separate Processing flow The Las Positas crush pad (and its crew) can handle about 10 tons of grapes per day at the peak of harvest. White grapes are whole-cluster pressed with a Diemme press, and the juice flows downstairs to 52 W in e s & V i ne s F E B R uary 20 14 Las Positas Vineyards cellar worker Jay Flachsbarth rakes pomace out of a stainless steel tank.